#61 How To Control Your Gag Reflex, Swallowing & Deep Throating With Dr. Ianessa Humbert

Struggling with your gag reflex during oral sex? You’re not alone. Joining us today to explore the complexities of managing your gag reflex is Dr. Ianessa Humbert, an accomplished scientist, professor, and sought-after speaker specializing in swallowing and swallowing disorders.

In this episode, Dr. Humbert breaks down the gag reflex and its triggers, before sharing her expert advice for minimizing an overactive gag reflex during oral sex. Join us as we unpack the various factors that can contribute to discomfort, from the sensory to the psychological, and explore practical methods for overcoming it, including calming self-talk and easily accessible relaxation techniques. We also discuss semen allergies (and aversions) and how to overcome them, before examining the physical strain involved in oral sex, optimal bj positions, and some of the best ways to make oral sex more enjoyable for the giver.

Key Points From This Episode

• Dr. Humbert’s background as a speech-language pathologist (SLP).
• Unpacking the gag reflex, its functions, and how it gets triggered.
• Practical tips for minimizing an overactive gag reflex.
• Using the gag reflex for pleasure during oral sex by creating natural lube.
• Psychological factors, and other elements, that can cause an overactive gag reflex.
• Using distractions, arousal, and self-talk to manage your gag reflex.
• How music and substances like weed can help you relax and reduce anxiety.
• The potential for semen allergies during oral sex (and how to overcome it).
• Strategies for deeper ejaculation to avoid taste buds.
• Avoiding numbing sprays to prevent long-term nerve damage.
• Tips for making oral sex more enjoyable for the giver.
• The importance of communication and consent in oral sex.
• An overview of the physical strain involved in performing oral sex.
• How cosmetic procedures like Botox can impact muscle function.
• Exploring the flexibility of the tongue in oral sex performance.
• Positions to reduce strain and the gag reflex during oral sex.
• How to get in touch with Dr. Ianessa Humbert.

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Transcript

IH: “But here’s the beautiful part of it. In general, when you gag, obviously, you want to have lube and your body creates lube. It actually creates a much thicker, more viscous saliva than the saliva that comes from your sublingual glands in your oral cavity that tend to be more thin and watery, right? So, you almost, you create a very natural lube, if you will. There are some people who gag just a little bit to get that lube up in the middle of the act because they are so in touch with their body that they can do just like a mini gag.”

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:39] SJ: This is the Bad Girls Bible Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Jameson, and this is the place where I interview experts and professionals, and everyone in between to teach you how to dramatically improve your relationships and have more enjoyable sex more often. If you’re not already subscribed to the Bad Girls Bible Podcast, you just need you to open your podcast app, search for Bad Girls Bible, and hit that subscribe button so you get the latest episodes delivered straight to you, the moment they’re released.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:01:11] SJ: Today, I’m talking with Dr. Ianessa Humbert. She is an accomplished scientist, professor, and highly sought-after speaker with expertise in swallowing and swallowing disorders. Dr. Humbert, Ianessa, thanks so much for coming on the show.

[0:01:25] IH: Thank you. I’m so excited to talk to your audience.

[0:01:28] SJ: Awesome. So, I’d love to start off like I start off every podcast with a little bit about you, your background, and how you came to, I guess, become a swallowologist, or study swallowing disorders.

[0:01:42] IH: Sure. So, my background is in speech-language pathology, and speech-language pathologists deal with a wide range of things, everywhere from articulating sounds, to language cognition, voice disorders, as well as swallowing disorders. While I started out thinking that maybe I wanted to deal with articulation, when I started to do my dissertation at the National Institutes of Health, at the NIH, they had a special need for someone to work with people with swallowing disorders in the research area. That’s what really brought me in and kept me in. So, it’s been 20 years that I’ve been working in this area, in particular.

What I love most about it is that it is such an underappreciated function. You swallow 525,600 times a day, every minute, and that means you swallow a liter of saliva a day, and saliva is necessary to just be coating those tissues, those pink tissues that line you from your mouth to your butt. They’re called mucosa. It has such an integral role in not just bodily functions for nutrition and hydration, but also for just regulation. So, managing your saliva. As well as quality of life and quality of life includes sexual pleasure, as well as eating food with folks that you love. Think about every time you’re around your friends and family, what do we do? What are we drinking? What are we eating? We’re rarely sitting there, just not eating anything, unless it’s a faculty meeting or a staff meeting, and even then, they might have some lunch-based one, right?

So, eating and drinking in your oral cavity is amazing and it is underappreciated, although it’s well understood in scientific communities. Another thing I want to note that I think is fantastic is that your very first swallow is when you’re in your 10^th week of gestation in your mom’s belly. That’s when you swallow first, and what you swallow is amniotic fluid, which is essentially your urine. Everyone has swallowed pee by the time they’re born because that’s how you regulate amniotic fluid. The baby is swallowing and peeing, and swallowing and peeing as they grow.

All of these things just tells you how important swallowing is that by the 10^th week of gestation, it needs to be in place in order for you to function in a healthy way.

[0:04:00] SJ: Wow. That’s wild. So, does a baby in the womb, do they swallow much amniotic fluid in total?

[0:04:06] IH: Yes. They’re constantly swallowing. They’re dwelling in it. They’re completely consumed by it. In order to process it, they’re swallowing it and urinating it out and that’s how it’s processed. In fact, sometimes they can determine that a baby might have an issue based on too much or too little amniotic fluid as they develop. Some questions might be, “Well, are they not swallowing enough? Are they not urinating enough?” So, there are all kinds of things that we can learn based on swallowing functions super early on.

[0:04:35] SJ: Wow. That’s brand-new information for me.

[0:04:38] IH: That’s the other thing I love about what I do is I can always stun people with great information. In fact, if I walk to any place. I live in DC where the number one question is, what do you do? So, I don’t care if you’re at a bar or a job interview. That’s the question people ask. When I tell them what I do, in their head, they’re like, “Wait, where are you between penises and birds? I don’t get it. Which swallow are you? I’m like, “Right in the middle. It’s not penises and it’s not birds.” Then, I get to explain all this fun stuff to them.

[0:05:06] SJ: Cool. Where does then, maybe, could we start with talking about sensations, reflexes? Where does that come from? And why do we even have these kinds of reflexes?

[0:05:17] IH: Yes. So, as I mentioned before, when you’re born, you already have the capacity to do these things. You can suck, you can swallow, you can breathe, for the most part. All of these reflexes are really important for us to just exist in an environment where our cortex is not mature enough for us to do volitional behavior. So, babies are balls of reflexes, and they have all the things they need.

If you have ever been around a baby, if you lower baby too fast, they’re startle reflex happens. They get afraid. That’s already in place. Sound, if you’re too loud, they cry, because of that reflex in place. They root for things. If you touch near their mouth, then they will root in that direction and try to suck on it because their job is just to stay alive long enough for our species to not die out, right? Because you can’t teach the baby this. They have to have it in place. Swallowing is one of those many reflexes.

So, if I had to explain swallowing to you, I would say, is probably the only bodily function that has built-in gravity control. Its built-in gravity control in defiance. What I mean is, when you have something that comes into your mouth, there’s two directions that can go. One is a good one and one is not a good one. The good one is going to be your esophagus and your stomach. The bad one is going to be your larynx, trachea, and lungs. When that happens to most of us, including babies, we cough and cough and cough. That’s our body’s response to say, “Get rid of this.”

The cough is a reflex too. The swallow is a reflex. The cough, if something goes the wrong way, is a reflex. Think of it like something going towards your eyeball, you see that coming, what do you do? Blink immediately. That means a reflex has a couple of components. One is a sensory one where there’s information going to your central nervous system, which is your brain and spinal cord to say, “Hey, there’s danger coming.” So, the brain and spinal cord organizes a movement to protect your body.

You have to have a sensory component, and then you have a coordination in the central nervous system to make a plan. Then, you ultimately have the movement or motor response. So, with swallowing, blinking, everywhere from burping, coughing, all of these things, which are generally a lot of them in your head, but also in your body. There’s so many opportunities to protect ourselves. That’s why it’s really important.

Gag is another big reflex, which I’m sure your listeners are very interested in, that we have in place to protect our bodies from foreign objects, or if you have poison or sickness to get rid of potentially harmful material that you’ve already ingested.

[0:07:44] SJ: So, I get emails all the time from folks and they want to minimize their gag reflex or get rid of it altogether. Would that be a good idea? If it was possible.

[0:07:55] IH: That’s like me saying, “Okay, there’s five reflexes. You have blinking, coughing, sneezing, gagging, and swallowing. Which one do you want to get rid of?” The answer is, please say none. I guess, maybe sneezing might be the least harmful, right? But when you think of it, you have these reflexes to protect your body. It’s another way to expel or expose something out your body.

So, the gag reflex, like any other reflex is hard to extinguish. The beautiful thing about a reflex is once that motor plan comes down from your central nervous system, it should be very difficult to suppress at a very stereotypical sequence of events that happens. You don’t even know how you do it. It just happens to you. If I said, “Tell me the five steps of a cough reflex.” You’d be like, “I don’t know. I just know when my body does it.” Our bodies are so smart to not give us time to think our way out of stuff. If you think about breathing, you mess it up. And you think about something you can do all the time, you mess it up. It’s like, say that word again, and you say it totally differently. That’s not the way you said it the first time because your cortex got involved and messed up those simplistic lower functions that reflexes are controlled by.

The gag reflex is definitely something that you want to understand, learn how to modify, but never extinguish.

[0:09:09] SJ: Is the gag reflex always triggered by something physical? Are there multiple things that can trigger?

[0:09:15] IH: Now, that’s a great question. The gag reflex itself, as I said before, a reflex requires sensory information to go in. But sometimes the sensory information can be some neural network that you already have in your brain from previous experiences. You can hear something gross, you can see something gross, and you can start throwing up. Now, with something tickling your throat, was there a foreign object in your body? Like a quarter that you may have swallowed? No. But sometimes the mere thought of something disgusting can make you gag, especially if you have a very hypersensitive gag reflex.

But it’s still information going into your central nervous system, even if it’s something you see or smell in the bathroom. That is saying, “Please, get rid of something. Do something now.” Maybe the gag reflex wasn’t the best thing to do, but it was a thing your body could do in that moment to deal with something that was disgusting.

[0:10:06] SJ: So, is that kind of going towards maybe a memory? Is that cycle – does that mean it’s psychosomatic?

[0:10:13] IH: Absolutely. The beautiful part of that is that the same way that your brain can derive these things that aren’t real, is the same way you can program your brain to minimize these things. I don’t know if anybody who can completely extinguish their bodily reflexes through thinking, but they certainly can be minimized under circumstances where you feel like this is not the time that I want to be having this reflex right now. If that makes sense.

[0:10:39] SJ: Would there be practical ways then that you’d suggest like, “Hey, every time I’m cooking, or having sex, or giving oral sex, I smell something, I taste something, something enters my mouth, I want to try and maybe minimize an overactive gag reflex.” Is there something listeners could do?

[0:10:58] IH: Yes. So, there are a couple of things. One, also, let’s think of gag reflex, not as a yes, no, black, white box. Let’s think of it as a continuum. Obviously, we already talked about the circumstances where you definitely want it to be in place, right? But there are places in the middle where it’s kind of cool to have, and here’s why. When you have a gag reflex, the behaviors in your mouth and your throat are almost like the opposite of a swallow. When you swallow, your tongue goes back to push food into your throat. Then, the muscles in your throat have a movement where they squeeze from top to bottom, and then a sphincter from that –

[0:11:33] SJ: Peristalsis, if I remember.

[0:11:36] IH: Actually, it’s technically not peristalsis. So, I don’t want to nerd out too hard. But you’re right, it is like the esophageal peristalsis, if you will, where you have these sequential muscle groups that move the food down. But at the same time, your larynx is closing and moving out of the way, so that material doesn’t go into your trachea and lungs. All of these things are happening.

But in a gag reflex, your tongue is going out of your mouth forward, to help to push the food out. The movement of your throat muscles are going from bottom to top to bring things up. Same with your esophagus. That’s why it feels so weird and uncomfortable.

Here’s the beautiful part of it. In general, when you gag obviously, you want to have lube and your body creates lube. It actually creates a much thicker, more viscous saliva than the saliva that that comes from your sublingual glands in your oral cavity that tend to be more thin and watery, right? So, you create a very natural lube, if you will. There are some people who gag just a little bit to get that lube up in the middle of the act because they are so in touch with their body that they can do, just like a mini gag, just enough to get some food up, but not dinner. So, they use that as a buffer that allows them to enjoy the process better, because we know friction is the enemy in this. 

So, to answer your question, the gag reflex, yes, there are things you could do, which we can talk about. I just wanted to give a little space and say, “How can we use it for pleasure?” Of course, there’s also the pleasurable idea that some people have that, “Oh, my penis was so big that it kind of gagged this person.” That can be exciting to that person as well.

[0:13:16] SJ: So, just to be clear, because I do get emails, sometimes from people that are concerned that, “Hey, I think this could be disgusting. This could be something wrong with me.” If maybe they’re taking their partner a bit deeper during oral sex, and they produce this much thicker, more viscous saliva. That’s just a completely normal physical reaction.

[0:13:37] IH: A 100%. It’s just like how your eye waters up when some debris gets in it. That is to flush it out. So, that lube there is a thing that helps us to flush out whatever you’ve ingested, that needs to come out. It’s a helper. If you can use it to your advantage in a sexual circumstance, then you can enjoy it and not be ashamed of it.

[0:13:58] SJ: That’s awesome.

[0:13:58] IH: It’s also free. You don’t have to go online and buy it. Your body makes it. Stay hydrated, people.

[0:14:05] SJ: Youdon’t have to worry about chemicals going, swallowing chemicals from a lube, either. So, what about are the practical ways that people can – people who might – well, first of all, I guess, talking about maybe an overactive gag reflex. How do you know if you have an overactive gag reflex or if it’s normal? Would there be like a sign or a checklist you could –

[0:14:26] IH: A super overactive gag reflex that we see in individuals who have a true physiologic or neurologic issue could be anywhere from a child who sees food coming in the room and they have extreme food aversion, and they start throwing up because somebody walked in the room with food. All the way to someone with ALS who has extreme issues with sensation.

Now, they have neurologic or psychologic differences. If you go to your general, neurotypical, if you will, populations who don’t have any other underlying issue, then you have people who tend to be on the more sensitive side, and people tend to be less sensitive. The more sensitive people are the ones who can’t even brush their tongue when they brush their teeth, even to the middle or dorsum of their tongue. They can’t even get back to their molars. They can’t even get dental care. They have to be put under. Otherwise, they’re pretty much fine. It’s just their gag reflex is so super sensitive that some of those behaviors regarding oral care become problematic, but they don’t have problems eating and drinking food.

Because when you eat and drink food, there is a neural network in your brain overlaps with the appetite of network. So, the structures are suddenly excited about food as opposed to repulsed by food. We have all been in a situation where we’re so full, that something we were just eating is now disgusting us. Like, “Oh, my God, I can’t even look at ice cream right now. I have five pints.” That is your body saying, “Too much.”

Even when you have that first spoonful, your mouth was watering, you’re like, “I cannot wait to take this food in.” And then by the 500^th mouthful, you’re like, “This is disgusting. I’m going to throw up.” So, we have all of these levers that are controlling this. So, the people who are super hyposensitive, would have virtually none, are people where you can poke and prod all you want back there and their threshold for this response is just really, really low. Again, those aren’t people who are in extreme danger. I suppose if you swallowed something really disgusting, then perhaps you would want to be able to bring that up with your fingers and maybe you couldn’t. But most people live somewhere in the middle where they can brush their tongue in the morning, but they don’t also have to like put all kinds of foreign objects back there to try to throw up either.

[0:16:43] SJ: What about, there’s a common, maybe it’s an urban legend. But it’s this idea that you can distract yourself if you have maybe a regular gag reflex. You’re deepthroating your partner. You don’t want to gag too much. Is that true? Can you put your thumb in your hand, close your fingers over, and distract yourself, or distract your nervous system?

[0:17:03] IH: You can do virtually anything to distract yourself. It’s whatever works for you. So, there are a couple things. One is, let’s think about if we want to use our central nervous system to override a sensation that is coming in. This is where I’m glad we talked about sensation. When we talk about sensory information, we’re talking about anything that is not your brain or spinal cord, sending information to your central nervous system. It can be your eyes, it can be your skin, it can be taste buds, it can be what you hear. All of these, what we call peripheral structures, are sending information to our central nervous system to say, “This is what’s going on in our lives, guys. Pay attention. This is what I’m experiencing. I’m a little cold. The air-conditioning is on.” That kind of thing.

But the point that I want to make here is that once it gets in there, that sensory gets in there, you can do whatever you want with it with your central nervous system. At first, you might walk into the room and you’re really cold, and then you get distracted by seeing your best friend, and you guys get on talking for an hour and you forgot you are cold. Now, that sensory information is still coming in. It’s not less cold in the room, but your cortex, your brain has managed to forget about it, such that you’re not sitting there shivering anymore, right? Because you’re distracted.

So, there’s two things we can do. We can modify the sensory information going in the first place. Some people suggest doing that by maybe using lube that has tastes. Now, this feels like perhaps something I might actually enjoy that’s meant to go in my body like food. They might mitigate it by incorporating hand movements alongside in taking the penis so that there’s still stimulation but intermittently with hand movement. So, the stimulation continues, but it’s not purely by their oral cavity. That’s mitigating the actual sensation. Adding lube is another example. So, now there’s a buffer between your structures, like your mouth and your throat, and actually the penis itself or whatever structure you’re putting in there. That’s mitigating the sensory information.

Let’s say you’re not doing that. You’re going to take it all in and hope the central nervous system, once it gets that information, can do something with it to change the response, which would be gag, gag, gag. Now, we’re in the middle. You have this information coming in. Many distractions can work. One is being very aroused really helps. If you’re aroused while this is happening, you are distracted. Think about people who have a hard time minimizing an orgasm, wherever they might be, in public, there might be people next door and it’s so much work to not just let the orgasm happen, right? Because it is overriding so much of your central nervous system that moment, there’s so much pleasure.

So, if you can ratchet up the pleasure while you’re doing it, then you’re often distracted by your own pleasure. Hopefully, that will also increase lube, in general. The other thing you can do is to think of the experience as something that is non-threatening. In between the act or during the act, you can think of it as a different kind of experience. If you’re obsessed with your safety, your body safety, if you’re obsessed with, “Am I going to die?” when you know you’re not going to die. This is not – you weren’t sleeping and somebody threw some coins down your throat. It’s just you accepting, let’s not talk about that. The concept would scare you, right?

[0:20:18] SJ: For sure.

[0:20:18] IH: Right. And your body would want to get rid of it. In this case, thinking about it as, “I have control, I have made this decision to do this, I’m in charge here. I can step back when I want to or I can go deeper when I want to.” Those kinds of things, recognizing you have the control over time, just like people who learn to brush their tongue, who we work with. Those are people who realize, “I’m holding the brush. The brush is not being thrown down my throat, I get to decide this.” So, the part of my brain called the amygdala, which is always sitting there with its machine gun, and it’s sore, because it’s associated with fear, its job is to say, “There’s a problem, there is a problem.” 

Over time, you can continue to talk to your amygdala and say, “There’s not a problem, we’re fine, relax. We do not need to protect ourselves. We are in good shape.” That’s a way to modify the programming in your central nervous system, not just with that, with anything, anything that you want to do, you can often use self-talk, if you will, to get through that circumstance. 

[0:21:17] SJ: I think that’s awesome advice. I think it helps a lot when you’re also with a partner you can talk to who understands that you’re not in a porn movie, it’s two people trying to enjoy themselves.

[0:21:28] IH: That’s right. That’s right. The other thing is, it’s not just giving pleasure to a penis, it’s also to clitoris. There are men who I’ve talked to who are ashamed of the fact that it’s not a sensory thing. It’s not like they’ve never licked a lollipop, and that’s just too far down their throat. It’s their relative dis-ease or disgust around that anatomy. And they have a difficult time, just the way anyone might have a difficult time doing anything. It could be changing a diaper, you’re not eating it, but it’s the idea of interfacing with that particular substance or that part of the body. They need self-talk more than anything else, because there’s just not a sensory one where something’s going down their throat. There is no threat, it is pure managing the disgust of it all. 

That takes a lot of psychological work to get through that, because as you said, it’s hard to pleasure your partner. You want to be there, but you can’t be there. And your partner then can enjoy it because they feel like you think they’re disgusting.

[0:22:25] SJ: Yes. They kind of feel what you feel and vice versa. So, what about maybe also having a glass of wine, two glasses of wine, smoking some weed? Can that help also? 

[0:22:38] IH: Yes. Those things can help with any stressors to be fair. Whatever substance that helps you to relax, it could be music, it could be being in the shower. You know, it could be that that feeling of the water around you doesn’t distract you some from the actual act. It could also be, as you said, alcohol and weed. If those are the kinds of things that helps you to have some cortical depression, if you will, so it’s not so on high alert, then that is certainly something that people can do.

[0:23:08] SJ: Speaking of oral sex, can some people have an allergy to semen to seminal fluid?

[0:23:14] IH: Yes, that’s definitely possible. I spoke to an allergist not that long ago, and there is a – now, I don’t know that all allergist do this. But she said, she has worked with a number of women who are allergic to their husband’s semen. So, the husband will come and do a sample. And over time, just like any other allergy-related issue, it’s about exposure over time. Then, they actually do help these particular women who have come to our clinic. So, it is possible to have an allergy to that.

[0:23:43] SJ: So, let’s say you don’t have an allergy, but maybe you don’t particularly like your partner’s bodily fluids. You don’t want them to come in your mouth. Is there a way maybe to meet halfway using maybe flavored lube or something else?

[0:23:58] IH: I don’t know that the flavored lube would actually help in this circumstance, because the location that this semen is usually ejaculated to is generally going to be a bit farther back. Now, you have taste buds, primarily on your tongue, but you do have some on your soft palate, as well as in your epiglottis. Now, for people who are fine with the gagging, but they don’t like semen, one thing to consider is, if you are able to deep throat, and that’s the time that your partner is ready to ejaculate. So they can ejaculate to a much deeper point in your oral cavity or your throat. Now, people like, “Oh, but what if I aspirate?” Meaning, “What if the food goes down the wrong way and I have to cough it out?”

Generally, we’ve actually conducted these studies when I was on faculty at Hopkins School of Medicine. Where we would inject the liquid right into the back of the throat right down the throat, and all people who have a reasonably healthy swallow have a reflexive swallow response that clears it immediately. Your swallow happens, boom, just like that. So, we know that most people should be able to manage that. It means, there’s no taste and immediate swallow, which is kind of what you want. Right in the trash can, didn’t experience it, and there it went.

[0:25:14] SJ: All in there.

[0:25:16] IH: Yes. What you don’t want to do, and if it’s a taste issue, the spit is even worse, because you can’t get rid of it quickly. They have to ejaculate in your mouth, and then, you have to gather it together, that’s the function that has to happen, and then spit. Maybe you have a can right next to you, because you’re a prepared person, or maybe have to walk to the bathroom all the while tasting it. So. if you are comfortable, and you’re somebody who likes to swallow, and it’s really just the taste and texture, then just down the hatch.

[0:25:41] SJ: What about numbing sprays? Do you think that’s a good idea to use?

[0:25:46] IH: It’s a terrible idea?

[0:25:48] SJ: Oh, why is that?

[0:25:48] IH: Well, because, just like anything else, your body has these nerve endings all over the place, from the top your head, all the way down to your toes. These nerve endings jobs are to tell your central nervous system important things about the state of affairs in your body. If you numb these areas, over time, we do not know if these sensory areas do not get their function back.

Now, in clinical circumstances and research circumstances, we’ve certainly used numbing agents, topical numbing agents, because we were going to do a procedure. If you go to your dentist, and they numb your oral cavity, what do they say? They say, be careful, you’re going to bite your tongue if it’s pretty bad, because you don’t know where your tongue is. Be careful, you don’t want to be eating a big meal, because we don’t know how far down your throat some of these agents have gone. Give yourself time, because your body is running blind with all these movements. It’s like running through a furniture store in pitch black, you’re going to trip on something. That’s what you’re telling your body to do, just start doing these functions, and we don’t know what’s going on.

So, if you continue to apply these topical solutions, you could be in a situation where those sensory nerves don’t come back. Think about Afrin, when people take Afrin to open their nasal passages, it clearly says do not do it a lot. EMTs see so many people who don’t listen, and now their nasal passages are permanently closed, or really chronically closed, because the blood vessels in that area have had it, frankly. So, we just haven’t studied enough to know what it looks like when somebody’s taken too many numbing agents, and the sensation doesn’t come back. When you really need to be able to choke and gag to get a piece of steak out, you might not even know that that’s what’s going on, and your warning system might not be strong enough for you to respond properly.

[0:27:39] SJ: It’s good to hear from a specialist, because it’s something that’s kind of, from time to time promoted by people. Ianessa, do you have any tips then for the giver to make, giving a blowjob, performing oral sex easier and more enjoyable for them in relation to their gag reflex?

[0:27:56] IH: Yes, absolutely. Have a conversation before about what is preferred and what is not preferred. Use cues during. So, as an example, before, you should be asking questions about where somebody can actually ejaculate. That’s a huge important question. The fear associated with something being squirted down your throat that you’re not ready for is a fear that you have in utero. You don’t get rid of it, because you really think this person is so cute. Your body is hardwired to protect yourself and not do dumb stuff.

As a result, to keep our species alive, these reflexes are in place. But dampening the anxiety and fear associated with the idea that if this is going to happen, this person has promised to warn me. So, I can enjoy it right up until that moment, and they don’t have to worry about it can alleviate a lot of stress. The other thing is excitement might mean thrusting. Thrusting might mean that you end up with bruises, or pain, or discomfort, or gagging, and losing your lunch. One thing clinicians can do is, if you’re a dental hygienist all the way to a speech pathologist, when you tell someone to open their mouth and look at the back of their throat, we can see whether somebody’s had those broken blood vessels in their soft palate. We need no more information.

[0:29:12] SJ: You just give a little wink.

[0:29:15] IH: Exactly. Whether or not the person consented to that level of thrusting or not isn’t beyond our scope of practice. But it does happen where somebody gets excited, grabs the back of somebody’s head, and proceeds to press their penis into areas that are uncomfortable. This is where it’s important to say, what can I expect in these moments, or have your hands on either side of the penis on their hips where you can push back as needed. Even babies have this reflex if milk is coming too quickly from a breast. They have a natural reflex to push their head back. There’s nothing wrong with doing that.

The more you respect your body and let your body guide and listen to your body the more enjoyable things are. But people don’t know your body, you know your body. So, if you need to tell this person, “If you’re getting excited, do not push my head into your body.” They need to hear it. If you give a slight warning by putting your hand on their hip and saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” or even pausing, that’s helpful. Because in the end, it does impact the way you feel about having sex or providing oral sex. The giver sometimes is just not particularly aware, they’re just excited because you’re awesome.

[0:30:27] SJ: So, can certain muscles in the mouth, oral cavity, lips, tongue, is quite normal for them to get tired when they’re performing oral sex on a vulva, on a penis?

[0:30:39] IH: Absolutely. So, the muscles in your face and your neck are meant to do mid to low contractual level behaviors. When you think about your upper air digestive system, it needs to be always ready. It’s never completely relaxed. When you’re sleeping, there is a place where your arms and legs have basically no contraction. But your breathing, and your larynx, and your lungs, and your oral cavity, and your tongue to a degree still have an open or patent airway for you. In order to do that for your chest to rise and fall, and be a part of this breathing, they’re always going. Which, means they don’t fatigue a lot because they do low lifting, but consistent lifting as long as you’re alive.

That said, suddenly, now, you have to do this maximum contractual behavior for 15, 5, however many minutes. The next day, you find that the areas under your throat or store, right on your chin, the submental region might be sore, around your mouth, your lips. The muscles around your lips, they’re called orbicularis oris. When contracted, they allow you to have that purse string, pucker type, facial movement. As well as your tongue, and maybe your cheeks, those muscles are called your buccinators.

All of these muscles aren’t used to that level of function. As a result, you can be sore. They will subside just like anything else. But we’re now getting more complaints from individuals because of these new procedures. So, you talked about topical anesthesia, but also, let’s consider the lip flip. That is when people get Botox, or I believe it’s Botox, on their top lip to sort of flip it up and make it look fuller. That is paralyzing your orbicularis oris. As a result, you can’t get the purse string movement. Women have said to me, “I can’t suck through a straw and I can’t give proper oral sex because I cannot squeeze my lips around anything, because they’re partly paralyzed because I want fuller lips.” So, kissing works, but sucking does not. So, there’s a tradeoff there/

This is our body that has these functions intact, and as a result, when we interact with them by topical anesthesia that numb our sensation or that paralyze our muscles. We end up in circumstances where they can impact our pleasure or the pleasure of the people whom you want to perform sexual acts with. So. these are all things to consider. Glad you actually brought up the idea of being sore.

[0:33:02] SJ: I’m so glad you brought up this issue with the lip flip, the Botox in the upper lip, because I’ve never considered getting Botox in my upper lip, but it’s not something I would have considered at all.

[0:33:13] IH: Yes. There’s also people who have a limited lingual protrusion ability. So, the extent to which you can stick your tongue out of your mouth varies. Some people can touch the tip of their nose, and some people can barely get it out. In fact, some babies when they’re born have a frenulum or tongue tie, you may have heard of that. That is under the tongue, that limits them from sticking their tongue out. Some of these babies have issues with feeding. That structure can be lasered to free up the tongue some more.

However, again, some practices and a colleague of mine who has a dentist practice, she deals with this all the time. Like a big chunk of her practice is dealing with adults who never had the tongue tie release, and have all kinds of movements, and function of their oral cavities that are gradually getting worse, because of all of the compensations and accommodations they have to make in their oral cavity to do basic things. Some of it can be related to sex and sexual pleasure, because you need to be able to move your tongue, especially if you’re providing cunnilingus in order to do that well.

So, the flexibility of the tongue, the sensation of the tongue, all of those things can be impacted. If you’re somebody who when you eat food, and we all pocket food between our cheeks and our molars. If you find it difficult to do a sweep, to take your tongue and just sweeping those areas, because your tongue simply cannot reach, you may also be somebody who has issues with providing sexual pleasure where your tongue has to be out. It can be French kissing, but it could also be cunnilingus.

[0:34:42] SJ: That’s awesome. So, we’re coming up to the end of the interview. I have a few more questions. One of them is position. If someone’s trying to perform deep throat to their partner, is there certain positions that make it easier or make it harder?

[0:34:57] IH: Yes. So, according to the muscle groups that you find are sore, if you find that the back of your neck is sore, then you probably don’t want to do a position where your partner is lying flat and you have to hold your head up where your face is downward toward their genitals, if that makes sense. Because then, the back of your neck needs to maintain your body position, while your oral cavity can do these fine-tuned movements with the up and down. You might consider lying flat on the bed, if you’re maybe doing 69, or letting your head hang off the back of either the couch or the bed while they enter you. Or, having somebody sit on your face is a good example of that.

You might also consider a side lying position, especially if the individual has a curve in their penis. Then, you want to accommodate the curve and go off to the side. But I think a lot of people find that keeping your head in the upward neutral position, our positional muscles are used to sitting upright or standing upright. As a result, if you can be in a situation where you’re on your knees comfortably, and providing that, then all you’re doing is using your trunk muscles to move forward and back as opposed to just your neck. and you’re not holding your body up with your arms on top of that. Now, you have too many muscle groups going.

On the other hand, if those muscle groups and keeping them intact, and the slight discomfort associated with those muscles helped to distract you from the gag, then they suddenly become useful. You see. If you need that extra information, you need to feel your triceps tremor from keeping your body up, because it distracts you from the gag. Now, you’re using those slightly uncomfortable positions to get through what in your world is more of a disruptive thing. So, that’s, again, the beauty of sex and sexual positions. You can decide, “I’m going to be comfortable now and make it easy on me.” Or, you can say, “I need a little discomfort for the distraction.”

[0:36:48] SJ: Awesome. Dr. Humbert, Ianessa, thanks so much for coming on the show. It’s been incredible, so much information. If people want to find out more about you, maybe about the GULP Group, what’s the best place to get in touch with you and find out about that?

[0:37:04] IH: Well, actually, the best place to get in touch with me is through the Swallowing Wellness Center. So, we are starting the world’s first outpatient clinic for people with swallowing disorders. But that does include people who don’t have a swallowing disorder, but have a swallowing and to a degree gagging problem. So, if you go to my site, then you’ll see our information there. We are in-person, outpatient clinic, and you can click the info button, and contact me very directly through that website.

[0:37:33] SJ: Awesome. I’ll put it in the show notes. 

[0:37:35] IH: Thank you. 

[0:37:36] SJ: Thanks so much for coming on the show.

[0:37:38] IH: Absolutely. Happy to be here.

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[0:37:40] SJ: One last thing before you go. If you want to hear more podcasts just like this one, open your podcast app, search for Bad Girls Bible, and hit the subscribe button.

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